


The Dark Half

by RenaRoo



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV 2003), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 12:24:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16492547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RenaRoo/pseuds/RenaRoo
Summary: For years Leonardo has vowed to protect his family, but how is one supposed to protect their family from something that no one can see? And how can you tell whether or not the worst danger to your family is yourself? [TMNT 2k3]





	The Dark Half

**Author's Note:**

> Of my surviving earliest fics, there was probably nothing that carried the amount of ambition with it that The Dark Half did purely because here I was, some thirteen year old who read way too many Stephen King novels, deciding I was going to completely go against all genre conventions I’d worked with before and make a horror story. And I’m honestly still proud of a lot of the ideas that came out of that. Though, it’s a little embarrassing looking at the past. 
> 
> Which is why I wanted the chance to finally go back and revise this old story that honestly did a lot of things for my growth as a person. 
> 
> And I’ll also be making fun of mid-2000s A/N’s along the way because hot damn are these hilarious
> 
> [[Original Author’s Notes circa 2005] Turtlefreak121: Alrighty, I’ve been plotting this one for quite some time, so if you would please, this is The Dark Half and I’m not sure how good this story will eventually end up, but I know I have quite the tendency to use cliffhangers (evil snicker)]
> 
> Bragging about cliffhangers and using the term ‘evil snicker’. Oh boy. This is going to be a trip haha

Waiting for the night brought Leonardo to the surface at dusk.

 _Dusk._ He always found that word to have a dry, unappealing sound to it that caught in the back of one’s throat. Nothing like the actual atmosphere it portrayed, this beautiful calm better suited by  _twilight, nightfall, sundown._ And dusk certainly didn’t speak to the pleasure and ease that the time brought to Leonardo in particular.

For him, it was the start of his true day, the beginning of the nighttime freedom only granted to him and his family in darkness.

Being the oldest brother, being the chosen leader of their family clan, Leonardo had pressed himself to perform the part of the oldest brother, to be the fastest, the strongest, the most graceful. He had to push himself as the best in every possible way because he honestly didn’t know how else he could be a leader to his equally — or perhaps even  _more_ — gifted brothers.

At fifteen, Leonardo’s shoulders were tense and heavy with an unseen weight. He had to seek perfection in the almost futile attempt to earn respect from a gaggle of less self-important, less serious teenagers.

But if he didn’t have his brothers’ respect, if he didn’t lead them correctly, he couldn’t protect his family.

The price of failure was death for them. Leonardo found that unacceptable. Especially in a world where they were absolutely unaccepted.

Even with exceptions — friends who were as close as family, like April and Casey, or allies who they had earned respectful silence from — Leonardo was constantly aware that their enemies and those who did not and would not understand them far outnumbered them. That night alone, Leonardo as leader needed to maneuver his brothers’ surface exercises around the ever changing movements of the rival Foot ninja clan, the Purple Dragon street gangs which had splintered and expanded, and the generally unexpected that they always seemed to fall into.

As Leonardo looked over the peaks of rundown buildings and billow of occasional smoke, he could hear the soft patter of his three brothers landing not far behind him. He could almost anticipate that Raphael would be the one to step up next.

“What’s your call,  _fearless one?”_ Raphael joked, joining Leonardo in watching the distant cityscape. “You already rethinking topside training?”

“No,” Leo answered without even looking to the others. “I want us to take about a three block round of shadow tag. No weapons — palms only.”

He could all but  _feel_ the eyes rolling behind him.

“Oh  _pah-leese,”_ Michelangelo snickered.

“Even Master Splinter would let us use weapons,” Donatello pointed out with a sigh.

“Yeah, extreme rules or no rules,” Raphael sneered. He pulled his sai from their holster and quickly began spinning them while looking at Leonardo challengingly.

“We don’t need them out here. We need to work on speed, not weapon finesse. It’ll make keeping to the shadows less of an option—“ Leonardo began to list off his reasoning before his shoulder was whipped by the broadside of Raph’s sai. “Raph!”

“Guess who’s  _it_ ,” Raphael chuckled before trust falling backward into the alley below.

Michelangelo and Donatello quickly followed, laughing among each other.

With a deep breath, Leonardo resisted rubbing at his temples before joining his brothers in the game of shadow tag.

Three blocks was nothing for them. Child’s play for ninja of their caliber.

Even though Leonardo was the only one to stick to the no weapons rule, there was little to no maliciousness involved between the four of them. A rarity for teenage brothers.

They danced through the shadows, around one another, each faltering in the slightest of steps and leaving an opening. It was constructive, a way of safely identifying weaknesses in their forms and guard. They all needed it, needed the challenge from one another.

Once he was free of  _it_ status, Leonardo knew his best plan was to pull ahead and put as much distance between himself and the others as he could. He twisted himself in a leap over Donatello, landing his palms on Don’s shoulders before pushing off and blasting forward. He could hear his brother’s groan of frustration.

His plan was working, Leonardo pulled far ahead from his brothers and reached the designated corner with feet between them. He enjoyed the bit of competitive edge, the rush, the feeling that he could still pull ahead.

Catching his breath, Leo began to turn to face his brothers as they slowed in approach, but raised voices put him on guard.

Ducking back deeper into the shadows, Leonardo watched steadily over the edge of the building where the voices were coming from. He waved to his brothers, almost instantly silencing them.

They followed his lead, falling into line into the shadows.

“Trouble?” Donatello asked in barely a whisper.

“Don’t know,” Leo said, trying to make sense of the distant, but loud, words. He was unsettled, though he couldn’t imagine why. These sorts of issues were not exactly uncommon on their night runs. But there was  _something_ about this, it didn’t sit well deep in his guts, where he was beginning to feel hollowed out and  _strange._

“Uh, Leo?” Mikey stage whispered, a little too loud for Leo’s liking. “You alright, dude? You look… pale.”

“What?” Leo answered defensively raising his shoulders. “No. No, I’m fine. Just… Trying to read the situation.”

Without a second to breathe, the air was interrupted with an ear piercing noise — the firing of a gun.

Raphael spun his sai a last time before holding them ready. “Looks like time’s up for that, fearless.”

Leonardo felt the same sickly, gut wrenching feeling that had suddenly overcome him from before. There was something not right about the situation.

His thoughts didn’t carry for long, however, as a second shot was already filling the air.

“ _Go!”_ Leonardo ordered, though all of them were already in motion, and his stomach was completely cold with a dread he couldn’t place.

* * *

Big Tony was, admittedly, not the most original monicker.

Perhaps it was all he had earned from one of the least original ways to direct the small block of Queens that had been left over after the fall of the ninja clan and its vice grip on all underground activities. Ruthless, but not particularly ambitious. And so long as he and his crew maintained the hold that they had, he was going to be as ruthless as possible inside of his territory. It was a doomed strategy, especially among mobs and especially in New York, but there wasn’t a soul left in Tony’s operation who would oppose him on it.

That left the bloated, greased up man to smile with veneers to cover his rottenness, and his many stolen rings and medallions to flash to the public at large. He looked like a Dick Tracey villain in his dark purple pinstripe suite, and yet he terrified those underneath the heel of his snakeskin boots into silence.

Dressed as he was, Big Tony looked out of place in a darkened alleyway. But it was his most secure path for himself and his closest working confidante, Weasel — a man who more than fit his own monicker in appearance — to reach the dubious looking former pharmacy that acted as the most recent office for their empire.  

Still, it was a bad time of night, especially when a failed cover up involving a journalist had come to bite them in the ass so recently.

At least that event had taught Tony to no longer leave loose ends. Which was his intention that night before  _he_ ended up being on the receiving end of a surprise.

On the other end of the alley, in the shadows by the thick plated door that served as Tony and Weasel’s preferred entrance, stood the pudgy man of the hour.

“The hell,” Weasel muttered, hand already by his secured arm.

“You told him about our door?” Tony snarled, already feeling heat rising to his face.

“No way, Boss,” Weasel answered. “But, you know this guy. He never does anything right. Guess he forgot how to use a front door in between missing his payments.”

A growl rolled its way between Tony’s gnashed teeth, but he was not a man known for his restraint after all. So with bluster and confidence, remembering the sniveling pencil pusher he was dealing with in the first place, Tony began to push his way to the strange man in the bowler hat. “Erlinger! First you have the  _nerve_ to demand a meeting with  _me,_ and now you’re trying to show your disrespect by not even coming by  _my_ terms? The hell’s the matter with you? Do you need reminding of where your place is? Who’s the man that you keep the damn books  _for? Do you?”_

Weasel snickered from behind and lessened the tension that had been built.

They knew this nobody of an accountant, after all.

“Disrespect?” Erlinger answered with a strange lack of stammering. He didn’t so much as flinch, obscured by the overcast shadows. “No, sir. Of course not, sir. A lack of respect for superiors is  _not_ one of my vices.”

Taken aback by the words and the sultry confidence Erlinger had in presenting them, Tony stopped mid stride and looked back to Weasel. Weasel seemed as confused by the scene as Tony was.

“The  hell are you talking about?” Tony said flagrantly instead. “You on something? You call this so that we can straighten you out? Because with the heat on me like it is, Erlinger, you better  _believe_ that I’ll lay you out as I do it. I don’t need any whack job fucking up my books while I’m still lucky to be on bail, you worm!”

Rather than coil back in fear and regret as most would under the duress of being in Tony’s direct line of sight, Erlinger stood his ground, clicking his tongue. “Wrath. Avarice. Vanity. I see them all so clearly now. How was I ever so blind to the sin that ooze through that gluttonous body. Everything is so much…  _clearer_ now. So much…  _better_ now that I have been granted  _his_ sight.”

“What?” Tony balked, so off guard there was almost nothing else he could have said.

“ _Hey!_ You can’t talk to the boss like that!” Weasel cried out indignantly, pressing up ahead of Tony. He was pulling out his gun, face already covered in pure disgust.

From the darkness of the shadows, a simple smile seemed to almost glow. “And there is  _envy._ What sins we wear right on our sleeves.”

“Boss,” Weasel muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “he completely lost it.” Training his firearm on Erlinger. “The only thing I’m seeing on  _your_ sleeves, Erlinger, is that same ugly as hell blue suit you’ve had for as long as we’ve known you.”

“What did you want all this for?” Tony snapped. “You called this meeting for a reason. What is it? Stocks down? Pigs banging on your doors already? What brought you here?”

“Land acquisition,” the man responded simply. “An  _expansion of territory,_ if we’re going by your rudimentary terms.”

“Hey, Tony’s business is his own business, you pen pushing cockroach! Keep your noses in the books!” Weasel ordered harshly.

“I don’t have any investment in your crude criminal dealings anymore,” Erlinger clarified coldly. “I’m speaking of my  _own_ territory.”

That actually made Tony laugh. The man had surely reached some sort of psychotic break. “You ain’t got no territory, stooge. I  _own_ you, remember?” He chuckled and looked to his loyal lieutenant. “The nards on this guy, am I right? Who’s got  _envy_ and  _greed_ now?”

Weasel placated Tony with an immediate laughter, true if not bolstered for emphasis a bit.

“You laugh at my sins,” Erlinger said almost somberly, “but I wouldn’t. There isn’t any shame in sin. Those of us involved with the more nefarious side of life should know that. Accept that. What we  _should_ allow ourselves to do is  _bathe_ in it. To accept it and  _live_ by it. I hear that calling now. I know it to be something that will last beyond any mortal, beyond any means. It’ll have the most lasting impacts, the greatest legacies.”

“What a whack job,” Weasel muttered in astonishment.

“Putting it lightly, Weasel,” Tony responded, brows reaching for his hairline.

“I’m speaking of  _greed_ , gentlemen,” Erlinger elaborated more. “ _Greed_ , something the three of us are no small strangers too, of course. Greed… and its stupendous possibilities once we’ve given ourselves over to it. Over to  _him.”_

“Him? The hell you talking about?” Tony tried again.

“You see, he understands greed,  _is_ avarice. And I say that with no small amount of exaggeration. And, because of that, because of that  _need_ to grow and to be taken care of so that the empire may continue  _to_ grow, I must provide to him territory.  _Land acquisition_ , after all, was the first greed of all. The one that built his empire to begin with. That’s why he calls me. And he calls me to do this.”

Before the bizarre rant could even sink in, there was an earsplitting pop, and Tony felt a numbing cold in his chest. He began to sink just as a second bang echoed and it could  _truly_ set in that he was shot. Weasel was shot.

And he laid on the floor of a dark alley in the small bit of the Queens he had loved to rule aggressively so much. And he did so until darkness consumed everything around him.

* * *

When they landed in the alley there was nothing. Wisps of gun smoke were still in the air, two fresh bodies on the ground — but there was no life. Leonardo somehow sensed that the instant his feet touched the ground.

Somehow, impossibly, the shooter was not there in an instant after shooting two victims.

Raphael passed them all in order to be closer to the two fresh bodies, watching the blood pool between them. “Hey, I know these lowlives — they’re those mob doofuses from a while back. We saved that kid’s mom, the reporter, from them.” He sneered at the men. “Couldn’t have been to two nicer guys—“

_Judgment._

“Raph,” Leo said in a warning voice.

“What do you think? This one’s got a gun by him, think they shot each other?” Mikey asked. “Case closed?”

“No, case  _definitely_ not closed,” Donatello corrected, squatting down to his haunches to examine the scene better. “They are both l saying on their backs and facing the direction of their entrance wounds. Which means they were both shot from the same direction…” He looked over his shoulder toward the end of the alley where Leonardo was currently standing. “The shooter would have to have been right there.”

Leo squinted and looked around him for a hiding spot, high in alert with his twin swords readied in each hand. There was no dumpster, no pile of debris — nothing for someone to hide behind. Just a large, metal door. He walked toward it and tested the knob. It was locked up tight.

“There’s nowhere for the shooter to have gone,” Leo confirmed out loud.

“Oh, sweet! Are we about to play detective on this? I  _totally_ call being Batman,” Michelangelo said exuberantly. “Donnie, you’re Robin. Raph, you’re Alfred. Leo’s Commissioner Gordon.”

“Knock it off already, will ya?” Raphael snapped.

“Okay, Batman,” Don humored, “if the shooter was where Leo is now, and isn’t there by the time we jumped down here, who did it?”

“Don’t play along, that’s only going to encourage him,” Raphael admonished Donatello. “Leo, wrangle everybody up like you usually do. Y’know. Do your Leo stuff.”

“Huh, would  _Leo stuff_ include shooting gangsters in an alleyway? Because that’d make this case  _way_ easier to solve,” Mike joked with a shrug.

Immediately, every muscle in Leo’s body tensed up. He turned and looked in offense toward his brother. “Why would you  _say_ that? I didn’t do  _anything._ Why would you even  _joke_ about that?”

The panic built and built through his body, Leonardo could feel it choking him, clawing at his every nerve. The mere  _thought_ of being suspected, the coiling distrust, the hateful injustice. And then beneath it all, most hauntingly, a slight tinge of guilt. From nowhere, from nothing. Leo felt it all the way down to his own bones.

“Whoa, bro, I’m only kidding, calm down!” Mike laughed awkwardly, holding up his hands defensively.

“Leo’s right, we should be treating this situation with more respect,” Don huffed, standing back up.

Raphael was staring at Leo in confusion and suspicion. “We were with you the whole time, Leo, calm your tail.”

“I know that,” Leo snapped.

The defensiveness in Leo was only building and his brothers were beginning to look at him in more concern. After all, this wasn’t the first crime scene they had come across. Which was also why, when they heard the sirens nearing, they knew to leave.

“Quick! To the sew…er…” Leo ordered, pausing as he glanced to the nearby manhole.

His brothers caught on rather fast.

“I’m popping it open, you guys be ready to duck if someone’s sitting down there with a revolver, alright?” Raph volunteered, readying his sai as he came to the manhole then swiftly slipping the blade between the cracks and cracking it open.

Leo, with the rest of his brothers, were at the ready.

But, nothing happened. Raphael opened the rest of the manhole and even stuck his head in before giving the all clear.

“I don’t get it,” Mikey said, hopping down into the sewers in line with the others.

Leo hung back to close the cover behind them. His whole body still felt unsettled. “You don’t get  _what,_ Mikey?” he pressed.

“Where’d the killer go?” Michelangelo asked, scratching at his cheek in thought.

“Not our problem anymore,” Raph shrugged off in disregard.

“The police will figure it out,” Donatello answered confidently.

“Maybe,” Leo said lowly from the back. It didn’t  _feel_ like it wasn’t their business, Leo couldn’t shake it for some reason.

Especially the admittedly comedic suggestion that it was somehow Leonardo himself responsible.

The others mostly overlooked Leo’s comment and overall dour change in disposition.

“Man, I’d at least like to know  _why,_ that’s the question that always is the most interesting on  _Forensic Files_ and stuff,” Michelangelo continued to push.

“They were  _mobsters,_ dude,” Raph snapped. “What’d’ya  _think_ was the cause?”

“Simple,” Leo said, getting his brothers’ attention unintentionally. He blinked as he caught all of their looks, and then cleared his throat to clarify. “It was probably  _greed._ ”

Raph rolled his eyes and Don nodded slightly before looking forward. Mikey took a breath and sighed but none of them really reflected on the sentiment.

But Leonardo did. Because it felt so unnatural on his own tongue.

Like the guilt that had been building strangely within him managed to evaporate in an instant as he was overcome with a sense of  _rightness_ to that blame, a questioning of ethics that poured out from between his own teeth.

It didn’t necessarily feel  _bad._


End file.
